Language tried
to cage me in its cagey way today:
kept foisting “it”
on me, as if “it” were an actuality,
not just a place-holder.
“Language” is a funny
and dissembling
word as well – commences
with a span
that bridges and breaks down into the ugly
gorge of guage – which one enunciates as gwidge:
onomatopoeia for
the choking noise that gwidges
from your craw when
you, like Messrs. Holmes
and Moriarty,
fall into and through that throat to hell.
“Well” is using
up a lot of space as well: the Brits
prefer “as well”
to “too” and “also” which the Yanks
appear to favor.
Unexorcisably, the curse in verse that
that seems inexorably
to beset me is, I can’t write
favor without
having to – right now – write savor.
Psycho rhyme! That’s
part of how I know I don’t write
poetry at all, but
blocks of black marks packing into
architectural pretense:
hence this cracked stack-up
of lines to which
I seem to have consigned my jumpiest
synapses which connect
to grind my brain into at least
the simulacrum
of a mind. When I wrote books
that publishers
you’ve heard of published
(hoodwinked
people into letting me do volumes
such as Mr. Simon
and his Schuster then begat; by now
I’ve been found
out, so there will be no more of that),
I made my points,
as much as not, through disingenuous
rhetorical interrogation
– parenthetically attracting you
into my spider
web: implying I was answering a query
you’d just
posed. “What’s interesting is,” I’d ‘reply’
and then I’d
say what was. Once what was, was
that “compelling”
is a stirring call to laudable attention
and “compulsive”
makes you think of rabid rats in sewers
squeaking madly
while they gnaw into the nearest
ankle bone. That
rankles just to the desired zone.
I used to think
I was compulsive. Now I know I only
do what will compel.
Those are the sorts of points
on which I used
to dwell but now I’ve been found
out and Dutton,
Doubleday and Dell won’t let me make
them anymore. But
look! I haven’t written “it” for so, so
very long. Not
everything I do is wrong.
.
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